


Paradise

by thehonestman (orphan_account)



Category: EXO (Band), K-pop
Genre: Angst, Art, Family Issues, Incest, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:47:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23998504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/thehonestman
Summary: It is at this moment that Chanyeol realizes that he and Baekhyun have a bond that will hold their family together.
Relationships: Byun Baekhyun/Park Chanyeol
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21





	Paradise

Receiving the news of Baekhyun’s sentencing comes swiftly and without suspense. Chanyeol’s not surprised to hear it when he’s invited to his parents’ house, because it’s as though they’d all been waiting for it for a long time. Around a few drinks, Chanyeol and his parents reflect on the lost years of his childhood, and though Baekhyun never had a particularly strong presence in it, Chanyeol pities him all the same these days. He has no emotional attachment to Baekhyun, but something about him makes him emotional.

In the corridor, on the way out after a stiff conversation with his stiff parents in their stiff house, Chanyeol stops in front of a framed family picture hanging on the wall and ponders it briefly. He has a complicated recollection of the events from when the picture was taken, but there, somewhere in Japan, in front of some cherry blossom trees, there’s Chanyeol and Baekhyun and the rest of their cousins as teenagers on a once-and-never-again kind of family vacation. Chanyeol frowns at the picture, noting his own scruffy appearance and Baekhyun’s closed-off stance.

His parents call out to him again, breaking him out of his thoughts, and he leaves.

Chanyeol doesn’t write to Baekhyun in prison until the day his father dies. He writes the letter without thinking about it; he’s not really trying to establish any form of consistent communication, he just writes it to let him know that his uncle has passed. Baekhyun then writes Chanyeol a letter back that puts Chanyeol in a strange situation.

_Dear Chanyeol,_

_I’m sorry I haven’t gotten to write to you sooner. Or anyone, for that matter. I know I’ve caused a lot of hurt for the family, and while I can’t really say I know much about how I ended up here, I do regret putting you and the others through this. But I suppose I decided to be here on my own, because I learned that_ _if I can't be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal._

_In any case, I’m sorry to hear about Uncle. Really, I sit in here and I wonder if I caused him to pass, somehow. I guess that when lightning strikes one of us, it strikes us both. I wish I could be out there to be with everyone while this is going on. It would be great to see you when I get out, but in the meantime, dear cousin, if you write me letters, please let them be natural ones._

_Send my love to Auntie and the others, and I hope to see the world soon._

_Yours,_

_Baekhyun_

From this point on, Chanyeol keeps in constant communication with Baekhyun. He writes to him as often as once a month, sends him things whenever possible. It’s all a testament to all the ways Chanyeol cannot understand Baekhyun, because all the things he can send him are things Baekhyun asks for, but things that are not necessities. It’s always folders and markers and all kinds of stationery that he requests, though the quality of his letters does not change. In one letter, Chanyeol writes to Baekhyun to offer him a place to stay and to tell him that he will be there to pick him up when he gets out, and true to his word, he is.

Chanyeol is shy when he finally meets with Baekhyun in person, as though the man he's been writing to will be entirely detached from the person he knew, at least vaguely, growing up. But when Baekhyun comes out of the building with nothing but a bag thrown over his shoulder, he looks the same as he did years ago, perhaps more worn, but still has that youthful smile that he rarely gives to anyone. He gives it to Chanyeol, though, and it feels familiar. His handshake does, too, and his hand lingers in Chanyeol’s briefly, moving up and clinging onto his sleeve.

“Hyung,” Chanyeol greets.

“Thank you for coming to get me.” Shy again under his gaze, Chanyeol ducks into the car, and Baekhyun follows suit.

The ride to Chanyeol’s place passes slowly, and Baekhyun is as quiet as ever. He looks out the window the whole time, as if staring through the city rather than at it.

“A lot has changed, here,” he says. Chanyeol starts when he finally speaks up. He swallows.

“Gentrification.” Baekhyun looks over, finally pulling his eyes away from the window, and Chanyeol can feel his eyes burning holes into the side of his head. Staring, scrutinizing, analyzing, he asks:

“Why are you afraid of me?” Chanyeol stirs in his seat.

“I’m not.”

“I’m not going to rob you.”

“Why did you have a gun?”

Baekhyun’s mouth snaps shut, then, and he does what he’s always done; he draws back into himself in silence, where others don’t get to reach him. It’s a question Chanyeol had never asked in his letters, though it had been at the forefront of his mind all the while. Partially because of his paranoia that someone else was monitoring the letters and would confiscate it, but also partially because he was afraid of what Baekhyun’s answer might be. Regardless, his fears are warranted, apparently. Though Baekhyun doesn’t look mad, he looks defeated. 

They stay in silence for the rest of the ride.

Chanyeol shows Baekhyun around the apartment when they arrive, and while there’s not much to it, he’s pleased to give Baekhyun his own space, somewhere more comfortable than anywhere he’s been for a while. He shows Baekhyun into the guest bedroom, and lingers in the doorway for a brief while. Baekhyun has only the bag with him that he drops onto the ground but does not open, and then he looks back out the window immediately, as if on reflex, as though there’s something out there that he’s missing. Chanyeol wonders where his head is, watching as he takes it upon himself to open the window and let the warm summer air in, looking so small as he’s backlit against the setting sun.

Chanyeol leaves briefly, then comes back with a six pack of beer. Baekhyun turns around to the doorway when he hears them clinking together. He smiles, and the world melts behind him.

“Want a drink?”

Chanyeol guides Baekhyun out to the balcony through the living room, setting up the two chairs next to each other. He passes Baekhyun a beer as they sit down, and Baekhyun lets it stay in his hand for a while, hesitant.

“Let me thank you again for helping me out,” he says. “Really.” Chanyeol smiles.

“No worries. Pretty lonely around here, anyway.”

“Your mom ever come around?” Baekhyun takes his first sip of his beer. Chanyeol is halfway done with his. Out in the fresh air, he relaxes into the atmosphere of his new housemate. Otherwise, he’d be more reluctant to speak on this.

“Sometimes. Not much, though.” He tosses his head to the side. “She’s never liked the city.”

“Never liked me much, either.” Chanyeol looks over to him, bearing a straight face momentarily until he sees Baekhyun smiling back at him. That same, big youthful smile he’d had when he was first picked up, and the light reflects off his face: teeth, glasses, cheekbones, and he’s glowing. Chanyeol starts out with a slow, almost incredulous chuckle, testing the waters until Baekhyun starts laughing himself. They fall into a hearty, uncontrollable fit of laughter, and though it’s not that funny and they eventually forget the reason they were laughing in the first place, it’s the kind of laugh that both of them need, after a while. Finally fully relaxed, Chanyeol drops a heavy hand onto Baekhyun’s knee next to him as he keeps laughing. Baekhyun glances down, then back out at the city in front of them.

Chanyeol eventually brings a speaker outside to play some light music, and as the hours of sunlight continue to dwindle, so do their drinks. They talk the whole time, always leaving room for the silence that Baekhyun constantly chases.

“So what are you going to do, now? Do you have a plan?” Chanyeol asks Baekhyun. Baekhyun sighs.

“I’m going to keep doing art, for now. Don’t know where, or how, yet. But that’s . . . you know. That’s what my plan is. To be an artist.” Chanyeol chews his lip.

“I didn’t know you were still painting.”

“I am. At least I will, now.”

“Are you going to go to school?”

“Definitely.” Chanyeol nods.

“It’s tough, though.” Baekhyun hums. “Lots of artists in this city.” Baekhyun catches on to Chanyeol’s doubt, but he doesn’t seem perturbed, doesn’t say anything at all. If anything, he looks ready to laugh again. He stands up, collecting his empty beer bottles, and announces his departure for the night.

“Already?”

“It’s late.” 

Baekhyun places a hand on top of Chanyeol’s head, ruffles his hair briefly, and drops a kiss onto the crown of his head before disappearing inside.

An unexpected effect of living with Baekhyun is that Chanyeol’s life basically splits into two sections: with Baekhyun and without Baekhyun. During the day, Baekhyun leaves the house early for school, and stays out most of the day, even until after Chanyeol has returned home from work. The time spent away from Baekhyun is in silence, the same kind of solitude he felt beforehand, and during these hours, it is easy to forget that Baekhyun even lives there at all.

The hours when Baekhyun is at home, however, are purely concentrated hours of Baekhyun and Baekhyun entirely. The night hours are consumed by him, either because he’s spending all of his time in his bedroom and Chanyeol’s thoughts are consumed by questions of what he’s doing in there all the time, or because he’s spending time out of his room and Chanyeol’s immediate attention is consumed by his attentiveness.

On a particularly slow and lonely fall night, Chanyeol finds himself half asleep on the living room couch, dazed out with a few empty bottles of beer and a takeout container on the floor. Having almost entirely fallen asleep to the sound of some drama playing quietly on the TV, he awakens when he feels a weight fall on him, and stay there.

He opens his eyes to see Baekhyun laying on top of him, chest to chest, head tucked into the crook of Chanyeol’s neck. Chanyeol is suddenly wide awake, and his hands float vaguely around Baekhyun’s back, unsure of where to put them.

“Hyung,” he whispers. Baekhyun doesn’t stir, but Chanyeol’s sure he’s awake. “Hyung,” he calls again, and Baekhyun finally picks his head up. “What are you doing?” Chanyeol asks. But Baekhyun doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing.

“Just going to sleep with you, Yeol.” Chanyeol blinks, unsure of what he’s heard. Baekhyun drops his head back down onto his shoulder, tucking his arms up by Chanyeol’s head. “Just for now.”

Chanyeol’s eyes are still wide open, still searching and uncertain. The weight of Baekhyun’s body against his is not uncomfortable, by any means, as layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts keep them warm into the night. He lets one arm relax onto the small of Baekhyun’s back, but the other stays down by his side, as though placing the second hand on him would mean breaking some kind of boundary. His mind is a separate being from his body, and these are the hours where his mind is consumed by the attention Baekhyun gives him. 

No great comfort comes to his mind until his eyes roam over to the floor and find the empty bottles. He lets them write the excuses for him as the feeling of Baekhyun’s breathing lulls him into an uneasy, but heavy sleep.

Most nights, other than these, Chanyeol sleeps lightly, if at all. And when he does sleep, more than once does he cry out miserably in the night, as if fighting off things that have already been let in forever. On these nights, Chanyeol takes back to the balcony to learn how to breathe again, and Baekhyun, somehow sensing Chanyeol’s disturbed state, often welcomes himself out to the balcony as well, as if he’s not the very subject of his cousin’s nightmares.

“Can’t you sleep?” Baekhyun says, though he does not sit down. Instead, he stays standing behind Chanyeol, staring out at the lights of the city as they flicker off for the late to bed, or on for the early to rise.

“Not for a while.” Chanyeol jerks and shivers when he feels a hand land on his upper back, but it is never removed. Instead, it rubs up and down the expanse of his back, as though Baekhyun is trying to soothe him. The hand slides up, down, up, then all the way down along Chanyeol’s right arm until Baekhyun’s chest is pressed firmly against his back, crouching over him. Chanyeol doesn’t dare turn to look at him, doesn’t dare move at all. Instead, he stays still as he feels Baekhyun’s fingers fiddle with his own, reaching for something unreachable.

Undoubtedly this is a loving gesture: a family-like love that Chanyeol has never known. The intimacy feels nice, but the source of it is unsettling, and it’s tough to place exactly where it’s located. For the time being, Chanyeol enjoys the simplicity of it, and Baekhyun still seems to think nothing of this kind of closeness.

At all times, then, once this kind of comfort has finally been established in one another, living with Baekhyun becomes more like living with the feeling of a person rather than living with an actual person. It happens this way when you live your whole life without the rest of your family around you, without their comforting hands to guide you. Baekhyun and Chanyeol often exchange those guiding hands, switching possession irregularly until Chanyeol finally tries to define, wordlessly, where and when the hands are allowed to reach out to each other.

One winter evening, teeming with cold and anticipation, Baekhyun comes back to the apartment looking like he’s just run a marathon. The stress in his face is clear, as though something terrible has just happened, and Chanyeol invites him to join him in a cup of tea and a mindless TV show. He accepts the offer, and as he settles onto the couch, Chanyeol eyes him once, twice, then stays staring at the TV for a while.

“You look like you’ve had a day,” he says eventually, and Baekhyun grunts in confirmation. He’s staring ahead too, bringing his mug up to his lips, and Chanyeol no longer lets himself use that as an excuse to stop what he’s meant to be doing.

With his heart racing, he reaches out blindly, grabbing on to Baekhyun’s wrist and pulling it down to lower the mug onto the table. He can feel Baekhyun’s eyes on the side of his head again, and considers briefly how much things have changed since the last time that happened, when he first brought him home from prison.

Baekhyun’s hand now settled, forearm resting extended on his knee, Chanyeol reaches out, still staring straight ahead, and runs his hand up and down the length of his forearm before taking the plunge and holding his hand in an attempt to comfort him. He doesn’t interlace their fingers, just rests Baekhyun’s palm on top of his, and finally breathes out an unsteady breath. Sensing that Baekhyun hasn’t moved the whole time, he also picks his head up to finally meet his eyes, and when he does, Baekhyun smiles at him, though it’s not that familiar, youthful smile that he knows. He smiles at him like he knows something, like he’s in on something that Chanyeol is not. It’s a secret smile, tight and small and it says that he knows something. Everything.

“Yeah?” he says to Chanyeol, smug, knowing, but that’s all. Chanyeol doesn’t say anything. Instead he stays quiet, chest full of fear, and focuses on how small Baekhyun’s hand feels in his own, as though he’s never grown at all after all these years.

Evenings like these make Chanyeol cry alone in the shower.

One afternoon, Chanyeol finds himself wandering aimlessly about the living room, sipping on a bottle of beer, and trying to work up the courage to search Baekhyun’s room. It’s a Saturday, and though Baekhyun shouldn’t necessarily be at school, he’s been out all day after having spent all of the previous night locked away in his bedroom, ignoring Chanyeol until the sun had come up.

He’s suspicious, of course he is, because in all the time Baekhyun’s been living there, Chanyeol has not once stepped foot into his bedroom. He’s watched idly, even offered to help, as he saw Baekhyun bringing in more bags of his stuff from his previous home, but Baekhyun had always declined, opting to sort himself out as he always has.

But the sheer, impossible amount of hours that Baekhyun spends in there warrants his suspicion, and suddenly, Chanyeol is pushing open his bedroom door gently, as if Baekhyun is about to jump out from behind the door and frighten him.

Baekhyun’s bedroom is much neater than anticipated. His bed is made, fresh white sheets spread deliberately over the bed, and the floor is clean, too. Perhaps the only point of interest, at first glance, is Baekhyun’s desk. Chanyeol wishes that he could only take one glance. That way, he could look in, reassure himself that everything’s fine, and that he hasn’t found anything. Not that he knows what he’s looking for. Or what he would do if he found it. But the sight of the desk stops him, pulls him further into the room, and after passing through the doorway, he feels himself pushing another boundary.

Chanyeol first notices the stack of folders on the desk, next to some loose scraps of paper and eventually, his eyes happen on a pile of books. He passes briefly over the image of a young man printed on the cover of the top book, then touches--just momentarily, for fear that his fingerprints be found--the scraps of paper, which detail day-to-day reminders. _Pick up moisturizer_ , and the like. 

The stack of folders is the most interesting thing to be found, because Chanyeol soon recognizes that it’s the folders that he had sent him while he was still locked up. He picks up the first one, and opens it hesitantly.

Inside the folder is a stack of handwritten letters, placed in chronological order. Chanyeol recognizes first the handwriting as his own, then secondly the fact that they are the letters he had written to him. He furrows his brow, finding minor alterations made to the letters. Words like _my dearest cousin_ and _with love_ have been highlighted in all of them, and they show signs of having been folded and smoothed out several times.

There’s no reason for Baekhyun to keep the letters. Chanyeol surely hadn’t kept the ones he’d received. And the fact that he’d gone back over them several times, clearly analyzing them, agonizing over things that Chanyeol had tried so hard not to give a passing thought to is unsettling. It’s all unsettling, to find the letters so carefully preserved yet so carelessly displayed, it’s as though Baekhyun’s been wanting him to find them. He doesn’t re-read the letters because his hands are shaking too much, so he carefully replaces them in the folder and puts it back on the desk.

Now the room reveals more of itself. Upon a closer look around, Chanyeol also finds a camera set up on a tripod in the corner of the room, aimed at either the bed or the wide empty spot on the floor next to it. He approaches the camera to inspect it more closely, and as he does so, he accidentally kicks something on the floor underneath it.

When he looks down, he finds an array of art supplies. Several bottles of expensive looking paint, a cup of paintbrushes, and a large sketchbook that Chanyeol does not dare open.

He smiles painfully at the art supplies, as Baekhyun’s emotional appeal to him finally makes its way fully into his heart. The pity he’d felt of Baekhyun going to prison, the pity he’d felt for him his entire life, the pity he feels now for the struggling artist that is clearly within him. It all comes bubbling up, and he laughs silently to himself for being so affected by some bottles of paint. He pulls away from the tripod, and is about to head back out the door to mull over his discoveries even more, when his eyes land on the closet. The door is shut tightly, but Chanyeol is so fearful and so invested that he feels he just might open it.

He gets one hand on the doorknob before Baekhyun pushes through the door.

“What are you looking for?” Chanyeol jumps, as Baekhyun has frightened him for real this time, and he places a hand over his chest to soothe his heart.

“Jesus,” he says. “You scared me.” Baekhyun doesn’t show him any sympathy.

“What are you doing in here?” Chanyeol’s eyes search helplessly around the room. He’s so close to the exit, where his body tells him to go, but he can’t exactly rush out with no explanation for his being there. His eyes flash around, first settling on the desk, the camera, and then the paint, trying to put some pieces together. With no reason to say it, he asks the first question that comes to mind.

“Have you been going to school?” he asks. The question shocks even himself. Baekhyun’s eyes squint, staring coldly up at him, then off to the side and back.

“I--” he looks stunned. Like not even he knows why he says what he says next. “No.” Chanyeol blinks down at him.

“What?”

“Why are you in here?”

“Why aren’t you going to school?” With the realization actually hitting him, he forgets about Baekhyun’s bedroom itself, focusing in on his sudden anger, increasing steadily as Baekhyun stays silent.

“This is stupid,” Baekhyun says, and starts to leave from his own room. Chanyeol reaches out, pulling him back by the waist. There’s a moment of silence, then, in which Chanyeol breathes heavily into Baekhyun’s face, incredulous, as he stares at that same small, secret smile that Baekhyun has now put on.

“This is funny?” Chanyeol asks. Baekhyun actually chuckles now. “It’s funny that I brought you in here, gave you a place to live when no one else would, and you’ve been lying to me the whole time?” Baekhyun chuckles once again, and Chanyeol wants to smack him. “This is funny for you? Because it’s a real fucking problem for me.”

“Is that the biggest problem that’s happening in this house?” Chanyeol follows Baekhyun’s gaze down to where his hand is still settled on Baekhyun’s waist. His grip is tight and possessive, and he pulls his hand away like it’s on fire as soon as he looks back up to Baekhyun’s empty, expectant gaze, and it dawns on him what he’s saying.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember when we were kids?” Baekhyun whispers, and Chanyeol feels his life get sucked out of him. “Don’t you remember Tokyo?”

In a brief, disjointed moment, Chanyeol blinks widely at him, and he does, in fact, remember Tokyo. He suddenly remembers it all. He remembers feeling confused when Baekhyun had locked the other cousins out of their hotel room so they could play video games alone, he remembers Baekhyun sitting so close to him in front of the TV, he remembers Baekhyun taking Chanyeol’s hand and _trust me_ , he had said. _I’m your hyung_ , he had said, before guiding his hand down, and having him touch him, despite Chanyeol’s crying. And like being with the feeling of a person instead of the actual person, Chanyeol remembers feeling Baekhyun’s small hand on himself, before their cousins pounding on the door comes back to him.

“Oh, my God,” Chanyeol says. He clutches his hand to his chest, meeting eyes with Baekhyun once before running out of the room, out of the apartment and into the cold city streets.

Chanyeol recalls the way Baekhyun used to fight with his family. He passes a family with young children on the busy street, and in one of them, he sees Baekhyun as a child, sitting at the dining room table being relentlessly scolded by his parents. And in an out-of-body experience, like watching a movie, he sees himself as a child, sitting there at the table too, helpless to what’s going on and left only to watch on in silence as his cousin gets berated.

But the abuse was not a one-way street. He would also watch as Baekhyun would fight back, in a way he's never seen a child do. Despite the hitting, despite the yelling, despite it all, Baekhyun would fight back relentlessly, demanding that his truth be heard. In all this, Chanyeol could only sit on the sidelines and admire his tenacity.

He passes a cafe on his walk, and it’s spacious and bright and a group of people sitting around a table seem to turn their heads together and look out the window, right at him, all staring him down, and he recalls the one time he had attended Baekhyun’s birthday party as a child. Again his parents yelled at him, and again Baekhyun fought back, but that time, Baekhyun had finished off his battle with a look into Chanyeol’s eyes over a glowing birthday cake, searching desperately for the acceptance he craved. Chanyeol was willing to give it to him then, and still now, and perhaps that’s why he was chosen. It is at this moment that Chanyeol realizes that he and Baekhyun have a bond that will hold their family together.

In an instant, the people inside the cafe are back to their normal conversation, and Chanyeol wonders how much of his memory had been made up. 

But some things are too clear to be made up. From all the vague, hazy memories of Baekhyun’s family and their limited contact with the rest of the family, Chanyeol had known, all along, that Baekhyun was the outcast of the relatives, always the one standing on the outside looking in, always the part that no one knew what to do with.

Tokyo had been an experiment, and a failed one at that.

Something had changed in Baekhyun by the time his parents had passed away. No longer was he outwardly hostile and aggressive, which could have been partially due to his natural aging and maturing, but instead he became something much scarier in the absence of authority. Much quieter, much more stealthy. He got better at hiding himself away, opting to act out under the cover of dark streets as opposed to in anyone’s face. This way, he was able to hide his outcast status. Even from the ones who had cast him out.

Chanyeol turns back around to head back home when he runs into a crowd, not interested in watching a busking performance just now. He feels eyes on him again as an older couple walks past him, and he swears he sees the faces of his Aunt and Uncle, risen from the dead. They stare at him, and in their cold, gray, calculating gaze, Chanyeol feels as out of place as Baekhyun has been all his life.

In all this, Baekhyun had never fit in, and in turn, never found a home. Perhaps Chanyeol had been the first one to offer him one.

“Would you mind if I paint out here today?” Baekhyun asks Chanyeol some days later. “Instead of in my room.”

“In the living room?” Baekhyun nods. “Sure, just put some sheets down so it doesn’t get everywhere.” Chanyeol is about to head into his own bedroom when Baekhyun stops him.

“Actually,” he says. “I was wondering if I could use you as a canvas.” Chanyeol squints.

“On me?”

“Yeah. On your back.”

It’s only been a few days since the incident in Baekhyun’s bedroom, and the prospect of physical contact with Baekhyun is still sensitive, much as the air in the house had been in the following days. Chanyeol had come back from his walk to find Baekhyun shut up in his room, and after a period of taking the time to calm down from each other, of all kinds of contact avoided, Chanyeol had come to the realization that he is either too prideful or too afraid to kick Baekhyun out of the house. 

Every time he’s mustered up the courage to tell him, Baekhyun will give him a look, like a child looking over a birthday cake, that seems to know what he’s about to say, and begs him not to say it. The matter is yet to be settled, but in the meantime, there is peace.

“Okay,” Chanyeol agrees. “How does it work?”

“Take off your shirt and sit tight, I’ll go get my things.” Chanyeol gives him a look at that, and Baekhyun seems apologetic for the first time ever. He catches himself, backtracks a bit: “Just--”

“Yeah.” Chanyeol does as told, sitting on the living room floor shirtless, watching Baekhyun pass between the living room and his bedroom three times: once to bring in his paint supplies, once to bring in some books, and once to bring in the camera and tripod.

“Lay down,” he says, once the camera is set up, hooked up to a laptop that faces them. Chanyeol looks at himself in the recording, looks up to Baekhyun, then does as he’s told. Baekhyun settles on top of him, and for the sake of both of them, Chanyeol ignores the feeling of him straddling him.

“So you record yourself doing this?” Chanyeol is clearly out of his element, but as he watches Baekhyun prepare his paints, mixing them easily and pressing his shoulders gently down onto the floor, he finds that Baekhyun, himself, looks more in place than he ever has before.

The feeling of wet paint being spread on his back is one that Chanyeol has never known. It’s a sensation unlike any other, and while it’s not unpleasant, he can never seem to get used to it. He shifts uncomfortably several times, mumbling an apology into the floor each time, but Baekhyun says nothing, just hums along to the soft music playing around them, never taking his eyes off of Chanyeol’s back, waiting patiently until he settles.

“Is this live streaming?” Chanyeol asks, and Baekhyun responds for the first time. Gently, though, as to not disturb their newfound peace.

“It is.”

“So this is what you’re doing all the time in your room? You live stream yourself painting on people?” It comes out more accusatory than intended, but Baekhyun doesn’t falter in his movements.

“Usually not on people.”

“But sometimes?” Something in Chanyeol’s voice sounds hopeful that he’ll say no.

“Sometimes.” And something in his tone sounds like this is the last question he’ll entertain on the matter. So Chanyeol lays his head back down onto the floor, and relaxes fully into the feeling of the brushstrokes on his back.

“Okay,” Baekhyun says after a while, and Chanyeol picks his head up and looks into the camera. Baekhyun has stopped painting, and finally gets up off of him in a moment. “Stay and let it dry for a second, but it’s done.” He speaks with so much air in his lungs that it comes out as a whisper.

“Can I see it?”

“Come stand in front of the camera, first. So they can see.” Chanyeol does as told, standing up carefully and turning his back to the camera, and he tries to look at the footage on the laptop at the same time, but the angle prevents him. Baekhyun eventually turns the recording off, and Chanyeol looks at him, as if waiting for the next prompt. Baekhyun smiles fondly.

“Come with me.”

In the bathroom, Chanyeol tries to contort his body to be able to see his own back in the mirror. It’s backwards, and he’s only able to see it well enough to see that it’s a portrait of someone.

“Is it me?”

“You wish.” Baekhyun holds him still, takes a picture of the painting on his phone, then hands it off to Chanyeol. 

When Chanyeol looks at it for the first time, it’s clearly well done, and it’s clear that Baekhyun has talent, but it’s still a mystery. As suspected, it’s the portrait of a man, but not himself. It’s someone else, someone familiar, and somehow seems more beautiful on his body than it had in the original. Chanyeol studies the image silently as Baekhyun studies him, and Chanyeol finally speaks up.

“It’s from the book,” he says, and Baekhyun smiles. Indeed, it is the very image from the cover of the top book Chanyeol had seen on Baekhyun's desk.

“My favorite book.” The expression of the man in the image is neither sad nor happy, but simply pensive. He’s clearly modeling, clearly posed to make sure he looks good, but there’s something in the uncertain, unnatural, and unmistakably unhappy look in his eyes that makes Chanyeol frown.

“What’s it about?” Baekhyun takes a pause then, like he’s rehearsing what he says before eventually letting the words fall out of his mouth on their own. 

“It’s about how the lack of love shapes you as a person.” Chanyeol’s frown deepens. He looks for Baekhyun’s eyes, but they stay on the image. “And it’s about taking care of a person in need.” Chanyeol swallows. “And it’s about bad habits, and it’s about losing your childhood to circumstances beyond your control, and it’s about people caring more about how you appear to them than what you really are.” He says all of this in one breath, as if he’s desperate to get the words out of his mouth in favor of moving onto something better. But nothing better ever comes. “But above all, it’s about having everything, and then suddenly losing it all. Just like _that_.” He snaps his fingers to emphasize the last word, and it echoes loudly in the bathroom.

“It sounds horribly tragic,” Chanyeol says, now holding the phone at his side, resting against the bathroom counter, facing Baekhyun. Baekhyun’s eyes flicker from his back in the mirror over to Chanyeol’s eyes, and then back to the mirror.

“It is,” he says. He wipes a tear from his eye that hadn’t even fallen. “But there’s something good about it.” He pauses. “The artist himself, the guy who painted the image that the author used for the cover, he was really something special at the time.” He smiles fondly at himself, and Chanyeol smiles back. “He’s amazing, really. I idolize him.” He seems to lose himself in his reflection, face now holding that same pensive expression that the painting does. It appears that here, and only here, Baekhyun is finally able to purge his struggles, as though the only way he’d ever been able to communicate is through his paintings that no one would ever bother to look at. And Chanyeol suddenly feels bad for dissing his dreams of being an artist. Only looking at him through the eyes of a fictional man does Chanyeol see the depth of him, and all that he’s made of. “And,” Baekhyun adds, somehow hesitant to speak, now, as though he’s finally given up on fighting off his parents at the dining room table, “they say that he and the model were secret lovers.”

Chanyeol’s eyes drop to the ground, and he feels his chest flush, He covers himself with his hands, and the movement catches Baekhyun’s attention. He seems to snap out of his reverie, finally looking over to Chanyeol and clearing his throat.

“You can wash it off, now,” he says, and Chanyeol stands up fully. 

“Yeah, I’ll just shower now.”

“I can help you get it off,” Baekhyun adds, and Chanyeol truly cannot believe his ears. “It’ll just be hard to reach,” he justifies. Chanyeol gives him a knowing glance.

“Hyung--”

“It’s nothing, Chanyeol.” He blinks. “We’re family. It’s--just--Let me.” It comes out in a pained voice, begging, and somehow forgetting everything that had come up just a few short days ago, Chanyeol agrees.

Being in the shower with Baekhyun is strange, especially given the silence. There’s no music, and neither are speaking, just the sound of water rushing past their ears as Chanyeol hides himself from Baekhyun as best he can. But that’s hard in complete nudity, and try as he might to ignore it, Chanyeol is hyper-aware of every touch of Baekhyun's hands touching all over his back, much as he does it those nights on the balcony where he tries to save Chanyeol from the nightmares.

And so Baekhyun just washes Chanyeol’s back in the shower silently, pausing only once to drop a kiss between his shoulder blades. When he does so, Chanyeol starts crying audibly, but once again, it doesn’t stop Baekhyun from touching him.

Chanyeol steps out of the shower first, offering Baekhyun a towel as he does so. Before he can step out of the bathroom to go dry off in his own room, Baekhyun cuts off his route to the door, and with no great ceremony or theatrics, he places a hand on Chanyeol’s shoulder, and leans up to kiss him.

He presses his lips to Chanyeol’s only briefly, and that’s all it is. It doesn't feel like anything other than touching lips together, as if kissing a friend, or a relative, or somebody completely detached from romance. It’s as if Baekhyun would have done it to anybody, in that moment, as if all he’d been looking to get out of it is that intimacy, that closeness, that love he’s been missing his whole life. It happens this way when you live your whole life without the rest of your family around you, without their comforting kisses to guide you. 

From here it happens in silence, like going for this without saying words is any better than admitting to it. With weak hands and an even weaker stomach, Chanyeol moves Baekhyun into his bedroom, and Baekhyun smiles at him through his constant crying as he lays him down, and takes him there, hard and slow, and in that dead, eerie silence. 

Chanyeol stays on top of him, and only when he catches sight of the stack of folders on the desk does he realize that their positions have switched exactly from when Baekhyun was painting on him.

" _Hyung_ ," he cries out in a pained voice. Baekhyun stops him with a commanding hand on his wrist, and he turns himself over to face Chanyeol, and when his sobs only increase, Baekyun pulls him down, closer, and wipes his tears from his face. He whispers to him once:

"Look what you've done, Chanyeol-ah."

In the end there is quiet, and Chanyeol's tears finally stop once they're calmed down, laying side by side.

“I’m going to be going away, for a while,” Baekhyun suddenly says. Chanyeol waits for him to look up before responding, and when he does, Chanyeol is visibly upset.

“Where are you going?”

“It’ll be far,” he says. “But never too far.” Chanyeol settles into the pillows dejectedly, feeling like he’s missed something, like he was right at the peak of something amazing, and then was yanked back down by a grip around his waist. As though all the progress he's ever made as a person, or at least since Tokyo, has been stolen from him. As if Baekhyun actually _has_ robbed him of something.

But speaking out against it would mean unpacking something that he's not quite ready to unpack.

“When are you leaving?”

“Soon.”

"Will you visit?"

“I’ll write to you.” A pause.

“I’ll keep the letters.”

One month after Baekhyun leaves, Chanyeol’s mother comes over to visit him at the apartment. The only sign that there was ever any life in that house other than Chanyeol himself is the book Baekhyun leaves behind. _Keep it,_ he had said on his way out. _You’ll lose it one day, anyway._

“How was it, having him around here?” Chanyeol tosses his head to the side in thought. There are no words to describe the great unrest that floods his soul at the very thought of Baekhyun.

“Not too bad,” he settles on. His mother doesn’t seem to buy it. “I don’t think he’s quite what you think he is.”

“He’s always been good at running away. And he’s done it again.”

“I can’t control what he does, Mother.” She flicks her thin brows. “I’m not his keeper.”

“Well,” she says, standing up to leave, as though a half an hour visit with her son is simply exhausting. “I trust that you took care of him well. You two have always been good together.” Chanyeol holds his tongue. “And at least he’s not on your hands anymore.”

At least, that.

For a long time, Chanyeol doesn’t know where Baekhyun is, or if he’s even alive. It’s not until the very day of the eighth anniversary of his father’s death that Chanyeol receives a postcard in the mail from Turkey. There’s no signature, but there’s no need, because Chanyeol knows it from the moment he picks it up. There’s no saying what he’s doing in Turkey, but Chanyeol hopes he’s figured out how to either be a great artist or a great soldier. And there’s no note attached to it either, and at a first glance, Chanyeol almost thinks that it’s completely empty, which would be just as well.

But after looking over it again, Chanyeol finds that in the bottom corner is something scribbled, hastily, as if rushing to get the words out before somebody else claims them:

_With people like us, our home is where we are not._


End file.
